Improve your SEO through Meta Descriptions, Title Tags and URLs

To improve your position in search engine result pages you must use various forms of SEO (search engine optimization), both internal and external to your website. Here we cover the interest of structuring/formatting the MetaTitles, MetaDescriptions, and URLs of your pages to improve your SEO. Having the right understanding from the get-go will save you a lot of time and effort when improving your SEO.

Who/what do you use SEO for?

Although SEO is about optimizing your content for search engines, it is first and foremost the user experience that you should consider in terms of improvement. Indeed, it is quite common to consult websites that are perfectly optimized for search engines but don’t necessarily make us want to spend more time on them.

Remember, the visitors that interest you are not the robots (at least I hope not)! So yes, SEO will allow Google to index you better, but your visitors want color, images, quality content, and a human touch! In short, they want to not only find what they are looking for but also feel good about it, and eventually browse your other categories in order to go beyond their initial research. Besides, if you are currently on our site, I bet its user-friendliness accounts for something J

Create relevant titles and meta descriptions

The title and the metadescription are very important because they are what your potential visitors will see when they type a query in a search engine. The <title> tag will also allow search engines to identify the theme of your site and/or page.

So make sure that your titles and descriptions are unique, that they describe the content of their landing page, and that they make you want to click on them. Be careful, however, to respect the imposed character limit (about 70 characters for titles and 156 characters for metadescriptions).

If you edit your site in WordPress (for example), you have two ways to create your titles and metadescriptions.

a) Use a plugin

You can use a free plugin such as WordPressSEO by Yoast, which integrates them directly under the “writing” section of your articles in your WordPress interface:

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This tool is very simple to use and will give you valuable information regarding the relevance of your titles, URLs, metadescriptions, and keywords used throughout your content. The indication: Yes (1) means that you have properly optimized the field. Of course, you should not blindly follow the indications of the tool, it is only there as an aide. Just make sure your titles, keywords etc. correctly correspond to the content you present.

b) Program your tags directly into your html code

You can enter the titletags (<title> and </ title>) and Meta (<Meta name = “description” = “Text you want to display”>) right in your text box:

Wait a few days so that search engine robots will have the time to index your page and search for your article to check exactly what your visitors will see:

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Here are the best practices to implement:

Write headings related to the main theme of your page

Try to assign a unique title to each of your pages

Focus on short and powerful titles. As for titletags, the first words are the most important for organic SEO.

Enter your main keywords in the metadescription of your article/page while building a consistent sentence for Internet users. Give them the urge to read more!

Treat the structure of your URLs

a) Opt for simplicity

Seeing as the URL represents the address of your page, it is important that both engines and your visitors can understand it. This point is all the more important, as it will facilitate the sharing of your content. If your URL is too long, your visitors may be tempted to delete a part of it before sharing (which will corrupt your link) or even forego sharing it all together. If it is composed of a series of numbers and letters without meaning, they may also be wary of the URL. In any case, this is not good for you.

In reading your URL, visitors and robots must be able to easily understand where they are on your website. Taking care of the structure of your URLs will help you take care of the overall structure of your site, verify that the organization of your content is optimal. You should also make sure you do not have duplicate content on your site.

Remember that each URL must be unique as well as the content it relates to. If your content can be accessed by two different URLs, you may split the reputation of the content between URLs and end up with duplicate content. Google severely penalizes duplicate content because not only is it detrimental to user experience but it also complicates the search engine’s task of indexing. How can Google know what content to redirect the user towards if two URLs point to the exact same content?

b) Use keywords

If your URL contains relevant keywords, search engines and visitors may be able to understand more information about the content of the page than if the URL simply is made up of a sequence of random numbers and letters. Remember that your URL is displayed in search results (below the description) and the keywords will be displayed in bold if they match the visitor’s search:.

The use of keywords in URLs is therefore highly recommended because you will benefit from better indexing in the results pages and therefore a better click through rate.